Abstract
The general collision of an atom and a diatomic molecule (interacting through a single potential surface) is treated in the distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA). The scattering amplitude in the helicity representation is given by Eqs. (9)–(11) and is seen to be an intuitive generalization of the usual partialwave expansion for potential scattering. This general result contains only three-dimensional integrals which must be evaluated, in contrast to the six-dimensional space of the system in its center of mass. Both distorted wavefunctions suggested by Karplus and Tang (free molecular functions and adiabatic molecular functions) are treated and lead to the same form for the scattering amplitude. Several semiclassical approximations are presented with regard to the sum over partial waves. These lead to physically interesting results, and a numerical example is presented to indicate how accurate they may be expected to be.
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